


The Way The World Looks

by 50sNettle



Series: True Colours [Soulmate AU] [1]
Category: Eve (UK TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Implied Feelings, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02, colours au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-03 01:25:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6591019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/50sNettle/pseuds/50sNettle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve has always been able to see in colour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way The World Looks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MasterOfMadness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasterOfMadness/gifts).



> Someone stop me.
> 
> (JK. I'll never stop)
> 
> Also no one else appears to ship this pairing, which is really sad :( Where are you, fandom.
> 
> For MasterOfMadness, because she puts up with me.
> 
> I own nothing.

Eve has always been able to see in colour. From the moment that she was activated, the world has always been bright, colours everywhere, different shades, but nevertheless pretty.  
It doesn’t take her long to realise, however, that the rest of the human world was not the same. It’s Lily who tells her that all humans only see in monochrome, right up until they meet their soulmate for the first time, an idea that is both fascinating and ridiculous at the same time.  
“How does it work?” She asks insistently.  
“No one really knows. Scientists have been trying for years, and they’ve never found any explanation.”  
“Can you see in colour?”  
“Nope. Not yet.” Lily looks a little wistful. “Maybe one day.”  
“So, why can I see in colour, if you cannot?”  
Lily looks at her for a long moment, as if studying her to try and work out the possible problem. “I suppose Mary just programmed you that way.”  
“That does sound logical.”  
“You’re lucky,” her friend continues. “Some people never get see in colour.”

***

The whole concept of soulmates is still confusing, and so she decides to collect some more data on it. Apparently, it’s far more complicated than just finding one specific person amongst seven billion others. Some people never meet their soulmate. Some people people ended up with no soulmate at all. Some people found that their soulmate was matched up with someone else. Most people felt that the latter was worse than the former. She feels sympathy for the humans who will never get to experience the world in colour. She couldn’t imagine living the world in shades of black and white, not after colour is all she’s ever known.  
“I suppose,” she says to Nick, a few days later, “that I am lucky in that regard.”  
“How so?” The scientist asks, curious, taking a sip of his morning coffee.  
“I have never known the world to be black and white; Mary Douglas programmed me to see in colour.”  
Nick blinks, as if this idea is somehow unfathomable. “No, she didn’t.”  
Her face creases into a frown. “What do you mean?”  
“We worked on it together.” Nick is frowning too, but he also appears mildly fascinated. “Mary was interested in how the colours worked, and so we programmed an algorithm into your system to see if you would respond in the same way.”  
“I do not understand.”  
“You shouldn’t be able to see in colour - not unless...” He trails off, deep in thought for a moment. “How long have you been able to see in colour?”  
“Since the moment I was brought to life.” She thinks back over the few short months, recalling the first seconds that she brought to life, watching as Nick does the same, their eyes widening simultaneously as they reach the same conclusion.  
Oh.  
“Right,” Nick says suddenly, after a long, drawn-out moment of silence. “Right - Yes - I’ll - I’m going to - Wait here -”  
He gets up from his seat at the table, leaving the room and heading up the stairs. Eve hears the gentle hum of conversation from the landing, before footsteps echo from the hallway, and Nick reappears, his face pulled into a sympathetic expression.  
Ah. Eve nods slowly, communicating her understanding, as she feels her shoulders slump. Will might have given her colours, but that in no way means that she has done the same for him.   
That hurts more than it probably should do.

***

She meets Zac at the Halloween party that Will takes her to.  
He’s not like the other people there, the loud and brawling teenagers. He’s charming and confident, and Eve takes an instant liking to him. He’s someone that she could see herself being friends with, someone kind who makes her laugh. Even when Will takes her home, and that appears to be the end of that, Zac calls for her again. He seems genuinely interested in her, even after the spying escapades come to light, and she can’t deny that it’s nice. It’s better than going round and round in circles in her own head, about what she’s going to do concerning Will, and whether or not she should let him know about the colours. Even when Zac, unknowingly, makes it worse.  
“What do you think it would be like to see in colours?” He asks, offhandedly, during a break in the conversation of the long afternoon that they spend together.  
“I don’t know,” Eve lies, after a second-long pause, painting a smile on her face, trying to pretend that Zac’s eyes, watching her, are not a shade of chocolate brown, and that they are not as satisfying as the baby blue colour of Will’s eyes - the first colour she ever saw.  
Not that it matters. Zac clearly isn’t her soulmate, and she clearly isn’t his, a fact he proves to her when he storms out, only hours later, calling her a freak and a thing. She tries to forget - she wants to forget, not just Zac, but all of it - but she can’t. The past, as she had once heard Nick saying, will always come back, and that’s exactly what it does. Will saves her, like he always does, and she finds herself wondering if he can tell that she knows what colour hair he has, and if he, in turn, will ever know that both of them have eyes that are a shade of blue.

***

Zac comes back.  
He’s sorry, he says. He was an idiot. He’ll never forgive himself for hurting her. They’re just words, after all, as Lily says. Words that everyone has probably said, once in their lives, but, at this point, what does it matter? The world may be in colour, but sometimes it is still pretty bleak.  
So she forgives him, and they pick up where they left off. It’s still nice, despite all the unpleasantness before, and she’s happy, happier than she’s been for a while, actually.   
She makes a new friend - Cain, a rather peculiar boy, but, then, she is not exactly normal herself. And Lily’s mouth drops open when she locks eyes with him for the first, and she almost trips over her own feet, because the grass is green, the sky is blue, and suddenly they can both see in colour. Eve beams when she realises this. Lily has always been a friend to her; it’s about time that she found the person she was meant to be with.  
Zac tells her that he loves her, and she tells him the same, ignoring the way his brown eyes show his heartbreak when she asks to be shut down. Because she shouldn’t be able to see what shade they are. She shouldn’t know what technicolour looks like.  
When Will’s call for help brings her out of full shut down, well, that’s just peachy, isn’t it? As if she doesn’t need more reminders of who she really belongs to.

***  
Zac is not Zac.   
The person she thought is Zac is Adam, a robot created by Mary Douglas, to trick her, and Adam is a completely different person to who Zac really is, despite what his fake memories tell him.  
“You said you loved me,” he says, sounding more than a little broken.  
“I do love you,” she insists, and there’s sadness in her voice as she says it.  
Adam may be a robot, and he may not be Zac after all, but he still cannot see in colour.

***  
She’s barely managed to get KT to safety from PRICE’s EMP when the world goes grey.  
It’s gradual at first, so gradual that, as she faces Mr Gwenlan, she doesn’t really notice it, but suddenly, the colour is bleeding from the world like blood from a wound, faster and faster.  
By the time she gets back to Mary’s underground base, the world is completely black and white. Lily’s jeans are no longer a shade of dark purple, Will’s hair is no longer caught in between deciding whether to be blonde or brown, and he has no heartbeat. Everything is monochrome, and it’s like a part of her has died along with him. How can humans live like this for the majority of their lives?  
It’s the longest sixty seconds of her life, the seconds she spends living in grey. When Rebecca brings her son back to life, the world explodes within a blink of an eye. Everything is burning bright, but Eve decides, in that split second, that she doesn’t care. Maybe she is not Will’s soulmate, but he is hers, and having him alive again is what matters.  
She’ll take whatever she can get.


End file.
